The "mothership" landed in Albany on Monday — the traditional kickoff of the budget negotiation process. Known more formally as the General Budget Conference Committee, the meeting has been billed in recent years as an exercise in transparency, but in reality the rest of the process outside of that 20 minutes of formality will take place almost entirely behind closed doors.

“Now that the [one-house budgets] have been passed, we’re ready to go to work,” state Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie told reporters. “At some point, we’ll walk out holding hands.”

With a governor, state Senate majority leader and Assembly speaker all from the same party, the mothership marks the beginning of a process that often doesn’t hinge on drastically different ideology, but questions over priorities and how to best tackle major issues.

One thing that makes the three different is that the Assembly typically refrains from putting items that are deemed to be strictly policy related in their budget proposal.

"Often times the policy things that are put into the budget by the governor usually dominate,” Heastie said. “The numbers, to be honest, they are what they are.”

Non-policy items often include flashy proposals rolled out by the governor beginning in late December or early January to drum up excitement for the executive budget agenda. The pagentry of the governor's State of the State address outlining that agenda lends itself to further political emphasis. 

Heastie wants no part of it.

“No policy in the budget,” he often tells reporters eager to get his take on items the governor or the state Senate are pushing, or key proposals that are conspicuously missing from the Assembly rebuttal.

“We feel the budget should be a fiscal document,” he said Monday.

In this year’s budget, those “policy” items include, among other things, how to deal with cell phones in schools, and proposed changes to discovery laws and involuntary commitment standards.

Like the governor, Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins doesn't hesitate to include policy proposals in the Senate's one-house. She told reporters after the meeting that regardless of those differences, the trio of Democrats are at least heading in the same direction.

“We’re all looking at the things that we know impact New Yorkers, and so how we get to those answers is always open to discussion and debate,” she said.

Also represented aboard the mothership are members of the Republican minority in both houses, driving home the point that they feel spending under Democrats is out of control.

“When you spend $17 billion more than the largest budget in the country did last year, we all feel that that makes New York $17 billion less affordable,” said Deputy Senate Minority Leader Andrew Lanza.

Another key discrepancy between the three proposals is how to raise revenue. Both the Senate and Assembly proposed raising taxes on New York’s highest earners to fund their heftier budgets, while the governor simply proposed extending the rate already in place.

The three also disagree over how to handle tax breaks for the middle class as well as credits for families and businesses, including Hochul's signature proposal of inflation rebate checks for many New Yorkers.

“We are respectful of the Senate and we are respectful of the governor that anyone who wants to bring up an issue has the right to do it,” Heastie said.

Other question marks include what to do about MTA funding, and how if at all to anticipate fluctuations in federal funding as a result of Trump administration policy.